PEDRO COSTA RESTORED

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An artist whose intimately collaborative do-it-yourself practice puts him well outside any traditional industrial filmmaking model, since his 1989 feature debut O Sangue, writer-director Pedro Costa has been dedicated to telling stories of the have-nots of his native Portugal, describing their lives in luminous images that explore both his subjects’ obvious material poverty and secret spiritual resilience. Thanks to two recent restorations, audiences can rediscover two of Costa’s defining works: his luminous first feature presented in a brand new 4K restoration, and its follow up, 1994’s Casa de Lava, a genre picture-inspired work that reckons with Portugal’s colonial legacy and begins the director’s long engagement with his country’s often ill-used population of Cape Verdean émigrés.